What a gorgeous day to graft new baby apple trees at Barrack’s Lane Community Garden, as part of Oxford Permaculture’s wonderful Seedy Sunday!
This was the 10th Seedy Sunday in Oxford- and it’s so important to be saving our own seeds, or swapping and buying seeds from local growers, especially organic growers, and regaining seed sovereignty from the big corporations and those that are trying to buy up and modify our seeds so we become reliant on them! So youpi for Seedy Sundays across the UK (and the world!)
It was so lovely to have so many people down to our side of the garden, learning about growing apple trees, different varieties and their characteristics, and more! Between about 25 of us, of all ages, we grafted over 30 lovely trees, using many different varieties of scion wood. This is no mean feat, as it requires a lot of nimble knife work, so everyone who took a tree home was rightly very proud of their efforts.
Our wonderful grafter, Dom, had come down all the way from Devon, straight after finishing a grafting season at Adam’s Apples, and did an amazing job of skilling up over 50 people, of all ages in the art of grafting.
We grafted early eaters (like the red Discovery), great juicers (like Worcester’s Pearmain), and lovely local cooker/eater varieties (like Blenheim Orange) as well as some apples with great names such as Peasgood Nonsuch!
If you came and grafted a tree with us today, please look out for an upcoming blog post on Tree Care! The apples today were grafted onto M106 rootstocks and will produce trees that are suitable for medium sized gardens – about 12 ft wide and 10 ft tall at full maturity (more info here).
We hope that year on year we can combine Abundance’s grafting session (or perhaps one of the sessions!) with Seedy Sunday, as it’s such a great way to share knowledge about fruit tree growing, whilst exchanging and sharing knowledge about seeds and seed sowing.
Happy Apple Trees all those that came!
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